Data privacy notes on social plugins

Facebook

Our website uses social plugins (“plugins”) from the social networking site facebook.com, operated by Facebook Inc., 1601 South California Ave, Palo Alto, CA 94304, USA (“Facebook”). The plugins can be identified by one of Facebook’s logos (a white "f" on a blue tile or a “thumbs-up” icon), or the phrase “Facebook Social Plugin”. The list of Facebook social plugins and their appearances can be found here.

In case you access a website of our internet presence using such a plugin, your browser will contact the Facebook server and load the visual presentation of the plugin as well as present it to you. During this exercise, the Facebook server receives information concerning your visit of the website of our internet presence as well as further data like your IP address.

In order to procure a satisfying level of data privacy in connection with our internet presence, we have deactivated the respective buttons and placed a Facebook note prior to such access. Only if you intend to use the plugin by clicking on the Facebook note thereby declaring acceptance of a communication with Facebook, the buttons will be active again and establish a connection to Facebook.

Only in such a case your browser connects directly to Facebook's servers. Facebook transmits the content of the then visible plugin directly to your browser and integrates it into the page on our website. We therefore have no influence on the amount of data that Facebook is able to collect using these plugins. Information concerning the subject matter is made available by Facebook here.

These activated plugins allow Facebook to know that you have visited this particular page on our website. If you are logged in to Facebook at the time, it can associate your visit to the page to your Facebook account. If you interact with the plugins, for example by clicking the 'Like’ button or by posting a comment, the information you give is then sent directly to Facebook and saved there. If you do not have a Facebook account, it is still possible for Facebook to identify and store your IP address after you have clicked the Facebook note.

To find out more about the reasons why and the extent to which Facebook collects data, how the data is further processed and used, your rights in the matter, and settings options you can choose that protect your privacy, please see Facebook's Data Protection Policy.

If you have a Facebook account and do not want Facebook to collect data about you from our website and connect it to your member data saved on Facebook, you must log out of Facebook before visiting our website and clicking the Facebook note.

It is also possible to block Facebook social plugins by using add-ons for your browser.